Monday, February 09, 2009

Thinking about Socrates

Spent the evening mulling over ideas for an image I'd want to grace the top of this blog.

I settled on a picture I took a few years back while on an overseas trip with about twenty-five students. We were high up in the mountains of Delphi -- the home of the ancient oracle of the Greeks.

Socrates's buddy Chaerephon had visited Delphi. In fact, that had become a major source of Socrates' problems. In the Apology, Plato tells us that when Chaerephon went up to Delphi, he asked whether Socrates was the wisest bloke around. And, as the story goes, the oracle told him: 'No one is wiser than Socrates'.

Of course, Socrates was the first guy to admit that he himself knew 'nothing'. So if 'no one is wiser than Socrates' and Socrates knows 'nothing'... well, you get the gist of why folks got so peeved at him.

Well, going over these photos from the trip to Greece, I remembered something else about Socrates: he never wrote anything down. In fact, in the Republic, Plato says that Socrates had a certain distrust of writing. He thought it was too permanent. He thought it was just far too easy to write something down and then forever after to consider whatever was written down to be the absolute truth.

In effect, Socrates was scared of knowledge becoming static. That's why he was always hanging out in the Stoa and the Agora. That's why he was always bothering people with all of his questions. Because he recognized something fundamental about knowledge: that it's dynamic and always changing and so dependent upon discussion and deeper and ongoing analysis and re-analysis.

I think Socrates would have felt right at home in a paperless classroom. In effect, he invented the first one.

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Teach Paperless: Now!

TeachPaperless began in February 2009 as a blog detailing the experiences of one teacher in a paperless classroom. It has grown to be something much more than that. In January 2011, TeachPaperless became a collaboratively written blog dedicated to conversation and commentary about the intertwined worlds of digital technology, new media, and education.

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TeachPaperless was noted as a Twitterer worth ReTweeting by Education Week's Digital Education blog. Also in Ed Week: "Shelly Blake-Plock has had some really intriguing posts already this year and I'm already behind. Considering he published 639 entries on his TeachPaperless blog in 2009 it's going to be hard to keep up, but well worth the try."

“When I originally contacted Shelley last week to inquire as to whether or not he would be willing to talk to my staff, he jumped right in, and he didn’t disappoint. What impressed me most about him as I listened to him describe his practice was his clear vision of what it meant for his students to function in a classroom that he designed: it was about them learning. He truly designed the environment with their learning–their unbridled learning–in mind. His decision was not a secretarial one, but rather came from a desire to push students to take control of information gathering, processing, and creating.” – Chalkdust 101

TeachPaperless was named one of the 'Top 25 Blogs for Educators' byWorld Wide Learn.

"I think you have some great ideas for teachers, and as we do professional development around the state of Maryland, we will point teachers to your blog." Debbie Vickers of Thinkport.org a partnership between Maryland Public Television and Johns Hopkins University's Center for Technology in Education

"The invention of the computer promised to lead us to a paperless society but has failed to deliver on that promise... until now, perhaps?" TeachPaperless was featured by Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning as an Everyday Innovation

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Photo Credit: MJ Wojewodzki; a portion of a painted wall in the Villa of the Mysteries, Pompeii [2006]